Three hikers who made a pilgrimage to the abandoned Alaskan bus featured in the acclaimed Sean Penn drama Into the Wild had to be rescued by volunteers after one of them fell ill.

The three men were picked up by servicemen from the Tri-Valley volunteer fire department after one of them tripped and hurt himself with an axe. They had been trying to get to the rundown bus in the remote Alaskan wilderness, 180 miles north of Anchorage near the entrance to the Denali National Park and Preserve, for several days, but were put off by the height of water in the nearby Teklanika river.

It seems the men, named as Matthew Peot, 29, Thomas Young, 45, and Kenneth Young, whose age was not given, narrowly escaped the fate suffered in 1992 by Chris McCandless, the real-life adventurer whose story was told in Into the Wild and the book upon which it was based.

In Penn’s film (spoiler alert), McCandless (Emile Hirsch) finds his way to the bus following a two-year journey of self-discovery but is soon trapped without food supplies by the rising waters of the Teklanika. Unable to contact the outside world, he turns to consumption of local flora in a desperate attempt to fend off starvation and dies after eating a poisonous plant.

Rescue services are often called to the area near the abandoned bus, which has become a popular site for fans of the Into the Wild film and book despite the rather obvious dangers involved in crossing the Teklanika. A Swiss woman drowned in the river four years ago, though it was not clear if she was heading for the bus or just hiking in the area.

Penn’s 2007 film, based on the 1996 non-fiction book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, starred Jena Malone, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt and Catherine Keener alongside Hirsch.  It was nominated for two Oscars and received rapturous reviews from critics. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described the film as “a serious, personal movie about what it is to be human, and what happens when we admire nature more than humanity”.